A memory of GUI Easter eggs

MEMORY TRIGGERS

HAPPY EASTER – to those who celebrate the holiday religiously, and HAPPY PASSOVER to my Jewish friends.

As a blogger, lately I am the most erratic of correspondents. I am simply overwhelmed by the enormous lists of things that keep getting added to daily, often by things that insist on queue-jumping, and being taken care of FIRST. Me, me, ME!

The passport dilemma

On Thursday evening my daughter casually mentioned that she had just received her renewed passport, because it expired this May, and the family has plans for a vacation in May. As I congratulated her on her foresight, for some unknown reason I said, “I’d better check mine,” even though it turns out we’re not leaving the country.

BUT airlines always want you to show them ‘government-issued photo ID’ before they let you on a plane, and I have only two forms of that, my driver’s license and my passport.

So I checked – and, it turned out, we had BOTH applied for our passports together, ten years ago when she was 16, and mine was expiring in May, TOO. Funny how that works.

So panic set in, because the process takes 4-6 weeks FROM THE TIME THEY RECEIVE YOUR APPLICATION. Yeah, I can count. Late May is barely days after those 6 weeks IF I get myself in gear and get that application in FRIDAY.

Those who know me also know that leaving the house is a big deal, because of all the spoon-using steps it requires: Getting the brain on. Taking a nap. Getting dressed. Filling out paperwork on the web on the government website (’nuff said). Getting a photograph of the appropriate quality (thanks CVS). Getting a Priority Mail envelope ready from among my office supplies. Remembering to take the stapler to attach the photo. Driving to two different places.

These are steps healthy normal people take without a second thought, adding it to their list of errands for the day. For me, this is Hannibal over the Alps.

All accomplished. Home. Damp the adrenaline. Stare at the wall for the rest of the day.

The driver’s license.

The next day, Saturday, the husband brings up the form which the State of New Jersey, in its infinite wisdom, seeking to remove the people who MISUSE handicapped license plates and placards from their lists, forces the people who really need them to do MORE PAPERWORK, including getting a doctor certification.

I need this. I look up the paperwork, and navigate a DIFFERENT government site, start up the form, and get to the place where it wants to know when my driver’s license expires. This is not information I carry in my head, since I’ve been renewing by mail for years, so I look at the thing, realize it is expiring this very last day of March 2018. Aargh!

It is almost a comical repeat of the PREVIOUS day’s excursion (I normally try to leave the house no more than once or twice a week, and reserve one for singing at church. This is Easter week.)

It turn out the spouse (who does the paperwork since he retired) has been meaning to get to this. We BOTH have licenses that expire this very day. Oh, joy!

I’ll spare you the details, except that they include getting documents out of the safe to satisfy the state of NJ that we actually exist and live where we say we do (to be safe I bring every document we have), we scramble to get there after I figure out that, even though the DMV in NJ is CLOSED on Good Friday, it is actually open on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday (go figure), and we have until 1PM. Sort of.

I frantically try to find something that proves the DMV office is OPEN, and hit on the little camera they have for the inspection lines! Which has a time stamp of NOW, and shows cars in line. They’re open!

We get there.

The line snakes out of the building and halfway down the block.

Thank God – and all those who fought for them – there are handicapped parking spots right by the door, so I can sit in the car while the husband stands in line, and finish filling out the paperwork, and get everything ready for inside, so as not to hold up the process.

A kind official, seeing me sitting in my walker, moves us ahead a few spaces.

We are out of there with brand new licenses, good for four years (we’re probably moving to a different state THIS year), and a whole host of papers to put back in the safe. But I don’t have to drive to church on Easter weekend with an expired license, and all I have to do is make sure the insurance cards – which have been sitting in the Master’s piles since DECEMBER – get into the cars before we drive to church.

And the Easter egg of the title?

I remember the first time I saw an Apple II something with a graphical user interface – and a mouse! – in the Apple store in the Princeton Shopping Center while trying to help a writer friend of my grandparents (Aaron ‘Rod’ Marc Stein, author of 115 novels) choose his FIRST computer.

It was as if I had found my soulmate. I gently ignored the salesperson (who was having a hard time explaining everything), and used MacPaint on the demo computer, with the mouse letting me size an oval, and add jagged and wavy lines across the oval to separate into sections, sections which I filled with the patterns available, to create a quite decent EASTER EGG. I can still feel the rush!

I wanted to find an Easter egg picture at Stencil.com, but inexplicably for this time of year, couldn’t among the free images for the month.

You’ll have to use your imagination. I seem to have lost MacPaint somewhere in the past many Mac years. Created in an instant by a novice, it was a thing of beauty.

I will be dead meat tomorrow.

So be it. We’re singing for the 4:30 Easter Mass at the Princeton U. chapel, and I wasn’t able to drive in for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, or the Easter Vigil last night (have to be in semi-decent shape to sing, and can’t do nights any more), and I’m not about to miss today. So off to First Nap, then lunch, then Second Nap, and the husband is driving, which will save energy.

Tomorrow (and the rest of today) I will be useless, but that’s my life.

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2 thoughts on “A memory of GUI Easter eggs”

I truly consider myself an organized and vivacious person, but errands do me in. So much interaction, invasion of personal space, and sensory overload. Anything like that bit with the stapler, or remembering to take tape to the post — very taxing on my nerves, which makes my brain sleepy.
I have had the experience of license expiry. I often think there are simply too many things for adults to remember, and these are matters best left to, “Oh, hm, I should check mine.” LOL
I haven’t used Macs since university. I much preferred them. Too costly in comparison for my budget — but one day!
I now wish I had an Easter egg coloring book!

I wouldn’t change having a Mac for anything – Scrivener is native, and Windows can’t make my life a misery (though Word just did). And Pixelmator is wondrous and easy. My brain can’t take change – and it’s overloaded right now with OTHER change. Cost is the smallest of the problems associated with technology. My husband fights Windows updates continuously.